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HIRAM SIBLEY. 



AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BY R. H. THURSTON, 
DIRECTOR OF SIBLEY COLLEGE, CORNELL UNI- 
VERSITY, JUNE i 5 , 1892, ON THE OCCASION 
OF THE UNVEILING OF A BUST OF THE 
FOUNDER OF THAT INSTITUTION, IN 
THE CHAPEL OF CORNELL 
UNIVERSITY. 



~Tiii 



HIRAM SIBLEY. 



The world honors men who have inaugurated great 
enterprises ; it doubly honors men who have made 
great beginnings of grand social movements. Hiram 
Sibley was one of. those who first and most effectively 
aided Ezra Cornell in his great beginning of a grand 
educational evolution. Hiram Sibley shares with Ezra 
Cornell and his coadjutors and successors that honor 
which is perpetuated and symbolized by the material 
part of Cornell University, and it is fitting that he 
should be given a monument in its chapel, in presence 
of that erected to the memory of the founder. This 
would be true had he done no more than promote so 
well the general welfare of the University in which he 
came to take so great an interest ; but the man who 
helped make the fortune which the founder so greatly 
imperiled later in the effort to sustain his splendid en- 
terprise ; the man who aided so efficiently in making it 
possible that Cornell University should be founded ; 
who stood hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, with the 
founder during his life, and who, after his death, still 
more effectively promoted the noble work so well 
begun — this man had his own peculiar and noble work, 
and did it well. 

He was to make the real beginning of the new and 
special u liberal and practical " education, for the privi- 
lege of sustaining which Cornell paid his half million 
dollars and founded his university. He was to enjoy 
the privilege of inaugurating an important branch of 
that education of the " industrial classes " which this 
University was founded especially to promote, and 



which it has become famous for having so well illus- 
trated in its short life of a quarter of a century. It is 
this which constitutes the great beginning of a great 
work and which gives Hiram Sibley claim to highest 
honor. He began, and began well, a noble enterprise 
for which the world had long been waiting, and which, 
once inaugurated, was certain, in such a location and 
under such circumstances, to grow in magnitude and 
usefulness as long as the fundamental purpose and the 
aspirations of the founders of the University should be 
remembered. The bust in the chapel of Cornell Uni- 
versity is unveiled as a testimonial of the respect and 
affection of his colleagues and of the authorities of the 
University. It will stand unchanged through the cen- 
turies, and through all the long years will remind com- 
ing generations of students and teachers of their bene- 
factor, and give strangers some idea of the sturdy form 
and rugged features of the man who gained fame and 
honor as the organizer of a great telegraphic system, 
but a fame eclipsed by the brighter glory of the builder 
of a college for the education of the sons of the people. 
After all, the real monument is not bust of bronze or 
limned portrait ; nor is it buildings and apparatus of 
scientific research or of practical work that will most 
permanently give this man his fame. It is the com- 
mencement of the work that constitutes the claim ; it 
will be the constantly growing and never-ending good 
that comes of it that will raise a monument of con- 
stantly increasing magnitude and never-ceasing utility, 
beside which portrait, bust, or grandest structure will 
be of little worth. 

Aristotle founded a philosophy which is to-day of the 
past ; but the founder is honored by the greatest minds 
of modern times as a beginner. A great man saw his 



opportunity to make a beginning ; smaller men com- 
plete his work. Herodotus wrote a history ; it was a 
simply told story ; but it was the beginning of history, 
and Herodotus still lives. Copernicus, in his knowl- 
edge of astronomy, was a child beside the student of 
the stars in our time ; but he is immortal as the begin- 
ner of a true exposition. Newton began the develop- 
ment of the science of mechanics ; his " Principia " is 
no longer known in the schools ; but no more brilliant 
fame illuminates our modern time than that of the man 
who gathered these pebbles on the shore of the ocean of 
truth. Gilbert began a science of physics and Lavoisier 
of chemistry, innocent, both, of a knowledge of princi- 
ples and facts familiar to every intelligent college lad ; 
their names are forever famous. Linnaeus and Buffon 
and Lyell cleared the way to merely the portals of the 
paths of modern natural science. We honor them to- 
day. They will be honored so long as humanity shall 
move onward and upward. Watt built a first rude 
steam-engine ; Stephenson constructed the beginning 
of the railway ; Morse employed Cornell to lay the first 
telegraph wire beneath the ground and built the first 
overhead line, roughly and crudely ; but the flash of 
that first beantiful message, " What hath God wrought ! " 
will be remembered longer than bronze or granite shall 
endure ; Stephenson will never be forgotten and Watt 
will never ueed artificial buttress for his intangible 
monument. 

Columbus discovered America ; but his glory is not 
bounded by the narrow limits of Watling Island, nor 
is his memory lost in four centuries. Columbus dis- 
covered a world, gave foundation to a nation, made a 
history possible to peoples who, through all time, will 
remember him for his share in the beginning of such 



mighty possibilities. The voyages of Thorstein and of 
Brie were more hazardous than those of Columbus ; the 
conquests of Cortez and of Pizarro were grander in 
themselves than the strifes of Columbus ; the growth 
of the American nation is a more wonderful spectacle 
than the annexation of Mexico or of Peru to Spain ; 
but the fame of the discoverer and the beginner of all 
that four hundred years have seen on this continent, 
and that the coming ages are to see, looms up out of 
the historical past in grander and grander proportions 
as the centuries go by. And thus it is with all famous 
men. Their fame is measured, not by the greatness of 
their exertions or of the work performed by them in 
their own time and by their own streugth ; but by the 
magnitude of the movement which they have begun, 
and of the results which follow in the years and the 
centuries which profit by their foresight and wisdom 
and self-sacrifice. 

Thus it is here ; and we honor Hiram Sibley to-day ; 
not because he gave to Cornell University of his 
troublesome superfluity of wealth ; not that he erected 
structures that his own State should have raised as her 
share of the great work inaugurated by the general 
government ; not that he made it possible for the nation 
and the State and Cornell University to make good a 
promise to the people that neither the State would or 
the University otherwise could have at the time ful- 
filled, though the State had contracted with the general 
government to do so, and the University was ready to 
do all rightfully asked of it and that lay within its 
power ; he did all this and more. Yet it is not all this 
that entitles him to our respect and these tributes. 
Contributing to Cornell University large sums of money ; 
making it possible for her to place those buildings on 



this beautiful campus which were needed for the work 
to which she was pledged ; giving opportunity to the 
sons of the farmers and of the mechanics of the State to 
secure the most practical and liberal education of the 
time ; distributing libraries among colleges, giving 
schools to the South and the West ; aiding the worthy 
poor in a thousand ways unknown to any one but him- 
self : all these are admirable and beautiful deeds of 
righteousness ; but, while entitling the giver to love 
and honor, they are nevertheless not, in themselves 
alone, works which confer highest or most durable 
fame. We honor Hiram Sibley because, besides all 
this, he exhibited a foresight and a grasp in his plan 
which insured a future and continued growth of his be- 
ginnings into mighty works for future days and genera- 
tions. The world had just reached a point at which it 
was prepared to begin that newer development, in edu- 
cation of the people for the people's needs, anticipated 
by the wisest men from the earliest days, by Plato, by 
Aristotle, by Milton, by the Marquis of Worcester, by 
Comenius, by Richter, by John Scott Russell and by 
Van Rensselaer, and Lawrence, and Sheffield. 

When Ezra Cornell called his old antagonist in 
business, become his best friend, into the board of 
trustees of Cornell University, Hiram Sibley saw his 
opportunity and promptly seized upon it. He took as 
his share of the work the foundation of the Sibley Col- 
lege of Mechanical Engineering and the Mechanic Arts. 
He stepped into the place of honor and accepted those 
duties which the State had failed to perform ; and Sib- 
ley College became the root and the sustaining trunk of 
an enterprise of such importance and of such possibili- 
ties as even the wise man who founded it probably 
little realized, even though before his death he had the 



8 

pleasure of witnessing its first great expansion. In 
this splendid work Hiram Sibley had an earnest coad- 
jutor in John L. Morris and his colleagues. He gave 
the seed, directed its planting, and provided for its cul- 
tivation ; they did work which fell to them to do, and 
that beginning was thus made for which we here and 
now praise and honor the wisdom and liberality of the 
man who made it all possible at that time and in this 
place. He was happy in his opportunity, wise in his 
recognition of it, prompt and forceful in his seizure of 
it, liberal in his development of it. We are, even now, 
but beginning to see what that noble work may, if 
carefully and wisely promoted by his successors and 
theirs, become. It may easily be made to give to Cor- 
nell University the high privilege of becoming the 
center, for the United States, at least, of all educational 
work in these latest departments of a " complete and 
perfect " education ; it may yet bring her the distinc- 
tion, the highest of modern and coming times, of here 
becoming the mainspring of advances in applied science, 
the source and the support of the grandest develop- 
ments of modern life. 

Hiram Sibley lived to see this seed take root, to see 
the germination of the plant, and to witness a growth 
far beyond the limits which had been anticipated by 
him as possible within his lifetime. He saw it become 
a sturdy sapling; we have seen it within these few 
years grow to the altitude and the amplitude of a 
healthy young tree, splitting its bark in its rapid de- 
velopment of new leaves and fresh twigs and wide- 
spreading branches and swelling trunk. But not the 
foresight of the founder himself, not the best judgment 
of his wisest successor, shall say where or when its 
growth shall cease, if well cared for. Give the young 



tree room for growth, a wholesome soil, and a healthy 
atmosphere in which to expand, and generations shall 
be astonished by its continued rise and spread, and its 
most earnest detractors shall be converted to admiration 
and to helpful sympathy by its good fruits and healthful 
influence. 

Its roots and its branches already need more room, 
the soil is good and the atmosphere better than is usual; 
but more space, further enriching of the soil, more 
room for the branches, and a still more healthful at- 
mosphere are to be hoped for. These given, the value 
and the magnitude of Hiram Sibley's gift to Cornell 
University, to his State, to the nation, and to the world, 
will never cease to impress more and more every friend 
of technical and liberal education with its usefulness, 
its importance, and its growth in all that constitutes a 
real basis for the fame of its founder. 

Sibley College began twenty years ago as the germ 
of a struggling school of the mechanic arts, a higher 
sort of manual training school appended to a mixed 
course of instruction, neither an educational course nor 
a technical course in the full sense of the modern terms. 
Its students, half educated, half trained professionally, 
went out into a world less educated, less well trained, 
and made their several marks with force and decision, 
and began effectively to build up the reputation of their 
teachers and their alma mater. In the year 1885, its 
progress was such as to justify its organization into a 
technical college of the highest type, and in three years 
more it had outgrown its boundaries, and its founder 
had the satisfaction of seeing it necessary to limit the 
entering classes while awaiting enlargement of its 
buildings. This done, he saw, before his death, in the 
following year, a renewed growth of unprecedented 



IO 

rapidity. The course had, meantime, been made a pro- 
fessional one, with work at least a year above that ordi- 
narily given in such courses, and such that graduates of 
technical schools in good standing find a full year often 
necessary for satisfactory prosecution of their work for 
the first degree. 

To-day, this memorial of our friend, of the founder of 
Sibley College, is placed in presence of a hundred 
young men prepared to graduate from among five hun- 
dred beneficiaries of his noble work. The buildings 
erected by him, extensive as they are, are more than 
crowded with students, and double their capacity would 
be none too much for the coming years of this decade. 

They are filled to overflowing with the most exten- 
sive equipment of its kind in the world, given by Hiram 
Sibley, by a hundred friends of his enterprise, and by 
his appreciative successors ; yet double this unique out- 
fit could well be utilized to-day, and no one can say 
what opportunity may come for still larger extension. 
A hundred farmers' sons, a hundred sons of mechanics, 
hundreds of the most ambitious of the young men of 
the day, are flocking to share this bounty. Hiram 
Sibley has indeed made a grand beginning, and it now 
remains for the nation, the State, and all the friends of 
this, the greatest of the great social movements of our 
time, to fittingly supplement his work. 

This great work has another aspect still, which 
makes it a source of higher honor to Sibley and to his 
coadjutors than even that which we have just viewed so 
briefly. When the young senator of the State of New 
York accepted the first presidency of Cornell Univer- 
sity, he came, not to do the routine work of the college 
president of a long established and slowly changing in- 
stitution of classic learning, great and honorable as that 



II 



grand work unquestionably is. He sought not the op- 
portunity of promoting ' ; the liberal and practical edu- 
cation " of the "industrial classes" alone, novel and 
mighty and attractive as such work must have been to 
every statesman and every thinking man of his time. 
He came to aid Ezra Cornell in organizing a " people's 
university," in the sense that it was to be a real, an all- 
embracing university, offering all the elements of com- 
plete and perfect education to all classes of people. He 
came to perform his splendid part in the erection of a 
true university ; the like of which had been dreamed of, 
in misty and undefined form, by many a great soul in 
earlier days, but which had never before become con- 
crete. This was work for a president of a great univer- 
sity that might well attract any patriotic, wise, and far- 
seeing man from even a greater work than that of mak- 
ing laws for the State or even for the nation. 

When Henry W. Sage built the Sage College for 
Women, he added another element which brought Cor- 
nell University more nearly into perfect and complete 
form, which gave more nearly perfect symmetry of or- 
ganization than had been attained by any earlier struc- 
ture of this sort in the history of the world. When 
the same strong hand aided the University in its up- 
building by the erection of the Sage School of Philoso- 
phy, it was but another and grander approximation to 
that perfection and completeness. When the same 
hand, so often before working with White and Sibley 
and McGraw, in a common and glorious task, erected 
the library which stands, as a magnificent memorial of 
good sought to be done, in the midst of these great 
buildings and on the edge of our beautiful campus, he 
gave a great and radiant center to the complete system 
which was gradually becoming evolved from the earlier 
educational chaos. 



12 

The enlarged departments, and the growth of the 
material and visible university, under the skilful guid- 
ing hands of the newly adjustad administration, pro- 
moted by the unprecedented labors of a still too small 
faculty, came forward with astonishing rapidity to give 
example to the world of that Miltonian education 
which the blind poet dreamed of as "complete and 
perfect." 

How great the work here so well begun may be in- 
ferred when it is said that, to educate the existing body 
of American youth as well as portions of the world are 
already prepared to educate their coming men, there 
should be founded, in the United States, to-day, no less 
than twenty technical universities, fifty trade schools, 
and two thousand high schools, including manual train- 
ing and the " slojd" systems in their curricula and 
preparation ; while two thousand professors, with 
twenty-five thousand students, twenty thousand teachers 
and a half million scholars, should be receiving these 
untold blessings. A million boys are now growing up, 
needing and rightfully demanding of the nation this 
privilege of a complete and perfect education for their 
coming lives. The opportunity is still boundless, and 
many Cornells, many Sibleys, and countless lesser bene- 
factors, are coming forward, in the early future, to 
seize each his share ; but these men who made the be- 
ginnings are those who will be longest and most honored. 

Millions will, in future years, be contributed to the 
purposes of Cornell University ; but the first $25,000 
that Ezra Cornell paid for the privilege of giving to 
the State of New York his first half million will count 
far more than all. New schools will be added to old 
schools, and the University will be thus expanded to 
cover the world of culture ; but their builders will not 



1 3 

be rated with Columbus. Presidents will come in long 
procession as the centuries pass, but they who head 
the line, though the most distant of all, will be best 
remembered as the inaugurators of the work. Build- 
ings will rise about these lovely lawns, and among the 
fields beyond ; but the pioneer builders are those to be 
longest famous. 

The founder of Sibley College, as one of the vital 
organs of the great body of Cornell University, gave 
hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cause of edu- 
cation here and elsewhere, millions, very likely, to 
unnumbered and unknown charities and philanthro- 
pies ; for that generous disposition of the fortune 
intrusted to him we give him due credit. He gave a 
mass of buildings and a forest of tools that the purpose 
of the university and the aspirations of its founder 
might be, to that degree, satisfied ; for this his name is 
made for all time a household word among the youth 
of coming generations. He gave time and thought and 
earnest support and wisest counsel to the conductors of 
this mighty enterprise ; for this he is entitled to the 
gratitude of every friend of the people, of every friend 
of every phase of education. But that which includes 
all and best entitles Hiram Sibley to praise, to highest 
honor, to most enduring fame, is that he made the 
grand beginning of a glorious and mighty work. It is 
as the founder, as the Beginner, that so much of im- 
mortality as can be given by mortals is rightfully 
claimed for Hiram Sibley. 



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